Anti-Piracy Group Says: 'Child Porn Is Great' Since It Gets Politicians To Block File Sharing Sites

from the wow dept

For many years, we've seen the entertainment industry make totally bogus and unsubstantiated claims about file sharing sites being hotbeds of child pornography in an effort to get them to regulate or shut down those services. Of course, the actual evidence shows that file sharing porn is no worse than what's on the wider internet. But that doesn't stop the entertainment industry from making such bogus claims -- and it seems like they're gleefully admitting it these days. Jamie Love points us to an account of an event in Sweden, entitled "Sweden -- A Safe Haven for Pirates?" put on by the US Chamber of Commerce, where someone from the Danish "Anti-Piracy" group spoke out about how great child pornography is, because it makes it easy for them to get politicians to block or shut down file sharing sites.

"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium [Johan Schluter] declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites".

Of course, this is no surprise, but having him say so directly is a bit surprising. He goes on to admit that the entertainment industry is planning to use child porn as a wedge to demand "a giant filter" for copyright:

"One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand."

Of course, those filters don't actually work, and using them to force entire sites to be blocked, despite them having a relatively tiny proportion of such content isn't just dishonest and underhanded, but dangerous. We're all in favor of trying to stop child porn, but you do that by focusing on the source, not by putting up filters willy-nilly in a misguided attempt to get politicians to also protect your business model.

Either way, it's incredibly disgusting to have anyone claim that child porn is "great," just because it can be improperly exploited for the sake of protecting another industry's business model. That he's basically admitting that he doesn't remotely care about stopping child pornography, but prefers to use it to his advantage is downright sickening.

exploitation

Doesn't exploiting child porn for their own greedy ends make them just as bad as the people exploiting the children for the porn? It sounds to me like they actively encourage the production of child porn.

Right....

Ok, the way I see this is they're ******* crazy. Since when is anything exploiting CHILDREN great?! The sick individuals behind this new angle should be jailed for such a comment, considering all the child porn producers out there are now undoubtedly going "hell ya!" and stepping up the flow!

They should look at "Green Dam". It blocks "porn", but according to NUMEROUS reports (google it), it does not work as expected; or at all for that matter. If we want to stop child porn, we can't use it to support other ideas - we must search and destroy it as its own thing. It is a plight upon our society, and shouldn't be played down to the much less important level of intellectual property law.

Children are SUFFERING, I'm pretty sure none of us give a damn about IP when you compare it to that disgusting industry.

This sort of reasoning exposes the fact, once again, that the MAFIAA's agenda is not about 'what's right'. For many rights holders, it's NOT about morality. It's about BUSINESS. And protecting their profits, no matter what the cost...children's lives? yeah this member of the MAFIAA doesn't seem to care about that cost...

Re: Funny isn't it?

NAMBLA

I wonder how long before this guy's quote gets taken out of context and posted on the NAMBLA website? TAM maybe you can let us know when/if they use it, since I'm pretty sure you're a card carrying member or at least know someone who is.

Alright, that was wrong of me; I'm sorry, but I don't doubt that you'll be defending this guy and his organization for saying that. I just wonder if you'll be brave enough to post your defense here or keep it to yourself.

Nothing new

Waitaminute...

"We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works."

So if they monitor it, they have to download it to see that it IS child porn, therefore they have committed a felony by many legislators definitions that think having it, no matter why or how is a crime. So can't we just call the cops and make these guys go away? Or at least get sex crime listed?

Unless this asshole is suggesting copyright holders should upload or download child pornography as a tactic in bringing down file sharing sites, how exactly does he intend to prove that whatever file sharing site he wishes to shut down is actually carrying child porn?

Re: Right....

"Children are SUFFERING, I'm pretty sure none of us give a damn about IP when you compare it to that disgusting industry."

What pisses me off is that governments have criminalised child porn to the point where no person reasonably considering their own interests would dare report it. The self righteous mob should be encouraging people to help track down abuse, not helping to hide it.

I'm sure the anti-piracy brigade jumping on the bandwagon will not help either; they sell a 'solution' to politicians because of an ulterior motive, which does bugger all except placate the politicians who no longer get complaints from the average Joe stumbling across offending material.

One day, the entire music industry will collapse into itself, creating a black hole of DRMs and anti-piracy warnings and effectively wiping out all copyrighted music on the internet. It will then be the hackers, the seeders, and the general music loving public, who will share their years of pirated music archives across the world, and restore the internet to its natural order.

Re: Re: Right....

This is very true. If only there was a better way, where we could report these crimes without being potential victims ourselves. I am very sure that if proper legislation was there, people who stumble across offending material would be more than happy to report it.

Re:

"One day, the entire music industry will collapse into itself, creating a black hole of DRMs and anti-piracy warnings and effectively wiping out all copyrighted music on the internet."

I see this splitting into to camps before this is over. One of the copyright maximalists locking everything down and trying to control everything. The other side using something like the old copyright office, where works have to be registered and are not granted copyright just because they have been created. It would solve alot of problems copyfraud, the length of copyright, works actually going into the public domain, etc.

It could also incorporate a software copyright where the copyright is granted for 5?? years then that version of the source code would need to be placed in the public domain. This would solve several problems. The size limit that crops up on open source software companies, allowing them to compete with all the big companies. Incentivizing the open source market would make it more likely to be adopted by larger corporations.

In the end the restrictions being created by the IP maximalist would become so great as to force people and corporations to use this alternate copyright system. It would remove the issue of lawsuits, it would remove the issue of being arrested as a copyright thief, it would allow for fair use, and it would generally expand the knowledge available to humanity.

Re: Right....

The sick individuals behind this new angle should be jailed for such a comment

I have to disagree with this. Criminalizing production of child porn is great. Criminalizing talking about child porn, even in a favorable light, is very very dangerous. This person should be roundly condemned but absolutely permitted to make such horrible comments.

Re:

Not what he suggested. He suggested that child porn should be used as a tool to get politicians to create laws for censoring the Internet. And once the censoring filters was in place they should start lobbying for expanding these filters use to blocking file-sharing of their intellectual property.

It's not exactly a loss of sales that bothers them

The industry appears to want to shut down low cost distribution mediums to preserve their control over distribution despite the fact that the too gain from free distribution. They want more (to control prices completely) and they want independent artists to have a much more difficult time getting their stuff spread.

Say and do anything to get their distribution competition eliminated or neutered.

They can't afford to have the artists bail, and they want the maximum pricing control possible.

Re: Re:

And any registration fee creates biases in favor of the wealthy. [1 cent is much more than $0 when you multiply by every paragraph you have ever written]

I am against a system that makes it easy for the wealthy and business skilled to get monopolies or protection but most people won't. The good stuff most people do will simply get leveraged into works that the big cos will copyright.

As for software, I think I favor copyright removal for everyone, but we should be careful because closed source (trade secret) can lead to very strong lock-in monopolies when managed aggressively by the vendor. Copyleft like the GPL promote the opening up of trade secrets ("open up your stuff or else don't leverage these things we are creating in collaborative fashion quickly and expertly"). One monopoly type (copyright) is used to weaken another monopoly type (trade secret).

The right thing is to cut down copyrights (patents of course) but also require open source for all monopolies and software in positions crucial to society. [I prefer a free market position where the government, as a buyer, sets the example of rejecting closed source.] When more people understand how closed source is abusive and monopolistic and a threat to privacy, security, and integrity, we will vote it out as much as possible. Perhaps until that point is reached, we can keep copyright (copyleft) around at least for 10 years or something where the software truly will have a very low chance of being too useful once the monopolist can get their grubby hands on it without any pressures.

And before someone says that giving away the software will solve all problems.. Bill Gates prefers his software be pirated than someone else's (he understands the concept of giving away free samples.. but he is a monopolist through and through).

Also note that even if you can give away software binaries for $0, the companies will keep adding drm-ish obstacles so that the software will fail if the software doesn't get regular online update medicine from the vendor (and charging you money to keep the software in a working state). One way the software can fail is to have many bugs and the vendor simply discretely publicizes the weaknesses so that much malware gets created. There are many ways to self-destruct as well. And reverse engineering (better without copyright) is still very difficult for complex software. The binaries get recompiled frequently so that reverse engineering efforts take many steps back with each such recompile. No matter copyright law, source code is an intermediary product that will be kept trade secret. Source code are blueprints, and it makes a big competitive difference having it or having to try to reverse engineer.

Re: Re: Re:

Note that Apple made their comeback with the help of open source, but they used open source that was not gpl.

Google also made serious use of open source to reach their dominant position. It is true that Google uses GPL software, but they leverage a loophole in the GPL for their key software. They don't distribute their key server software, so the GPL does not require them to open up. Thus effectively, they are using public domain software and keeping their trade secrets (though to a lesser degree than Microsoft).

And now Microsoft is embracing open source aggressively (extend and extinguish follow the embrace).

It's very advantages to use open source and close it off. Lock-in is created by making a very modest number of strategic modifications to a very large code base. Even if you know they are mostly using open source, they can make enough changes to make it difficult for interoperability to be achieved. Hence they get the lock-in and the monopoly (or at least strong market share).

Point is that until we are ready to tackle the closed source monopoly problem (by rejecting it and insisting on open source), keeping copyleft around (like gpl or agpl) will help pressure the monopolists rather than allow them to gorge on open source to stay steps ahead of the open source they copied. While the public does the hard work, they copy and then change semantics around to break interop and close everything off as a trade secret that will be difficult to reverse engineer. With copyleft, they can study open source but can't outright copy/paste, getting all that work and costly bug fixing for free.

If the monopolist copies without much effort everything we do as a community and then adds extras (and closes the source), people that don't fear closed source will gobble it up and hence help preserve society's collective lock-in (via the network effect).

Note that Nina Paley uses CC share-alike which is a copyleft license created in the spirit licenses like the GPL. If here works grow and become very competitive, it pressures other players to also adopt CC share-alike so to be able to leverage her work. If they don't CC share-alike, then they can't leverage. If they could leverage and not share back (an effect that is much stronger with complex functional software), then the titans would have a clear advantage over Nina+community. If people spend big bucks at the box office, they have many fewer dollars to spend on Nina and friends. [But again, this effect is much stronger when source code is very key and interoperability is an issue.]

Re: hmm

Yes, that is very odd, did the blogger sit on this for 3 years? Also in all the comments on that article (although I admit, most of them are in another language I can't read) I can't find anyone else questioning the date.
I'm having trouble finding "first hand" information about this event, to try and find out WHEN it actually happened, 2007, a seriously typo'd 2010 or not at all???
Or is this a very late April fools?

RIIA, MPA & al.

These morons will be made irrelevant in the long run, their business model is simply unworkable in an era of abundance and will eventually die. Sharing and reusing is simply superior and natural, it has always been, and we had Renaissance out of it, and we had Shakespeare out of it, and we had Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn out of it. We have abundance and they desperately want scarcity. Who else want scarcity?
This reminds me ancient Romans who used barbarians to defend their borders. The problem is the damage they can do to freedom and a neutral Internet in the process. It doesn't matter if this news is a hoax, the problem is that it is plausible.